I prefer Cision PR Software over Media Monitor Pro. Cision PR Software is more expensive, but offers more options and is a better overall comprehensive solution to media monitoring and reporting as it monitors television, print and online news. Media Monitor Pro only monitors …
Media Monitor Pro is a great choice for smaller organizations, such as companies, nonprofits or PR agencies, that need to monitor television news coverage when a lot of television news clips are not expected on a daily basis. It offers competitive pricing compared to some of the larger players in the media monitoring space but without the "bells and whistles" of reports and analytics, but a smaller company wouldn't need those as much as a larger company that is in the news on television a lot. It's not as great of a fit for those larger companies, particularly when there is a crisis PR situation and the company needs to be tracking news media coverage constantly and have instant access to any and all clips.
PR Newswire is a terrific solution for ensuring that news is distributed in a way that is findable and searchable. It also automatically ties the news to ticker symbols. It's not a useful or meaningful solution for actually securing news coverage. It still requires picking up the phone and pitching media.
Cost effective - Media Monitor Pro offers very affordable and competitive pricing for television news media monitoring services.
Ease of use - it's easy to view clips sent in the daily emails and to edit, download and share them with others, even if they are not registered users of the Media Monitor Pro platform.
The scope of monitoring - Media Monitor Pro monitors the majority of local news television stations throughout the country, plus a decent amount of radio stations.
User-friendly - PR Newswire has a very user-friendly website that makes it simple and easy to get a news release set up for a distribution relatively quickly. You can also save your selections from a previous distribution to make it go even faster. Since I am pretty much always sending out my releases to the same distribution list, all I have to do is check that box.
Customer support - When you submit a release via the web portal, you have several options about when it will be released. I typically want my releases to go out as quickly as possible, but even then I know an account representative will take a look at my release and accompanying multimedia materials and give me a quick call to confirm and make sure everything is set before officially sending it out. It's a helpful step without making the process cumbersome.
Reports - PR Newswire provides timely and comprehensive reports, so it's easy to tell the where the news release went.
Clip availability - quite frequently, the links to clips in the daily digest emails would not work. After clicking the link, you would be taken to the clip player and it would "load" for quite a while and then say the clip failed to play. I would have to contact the support team to figure out if it was an issue with the clip or why it wasn't loading.
Clip timing - often when you begin playing a clip in the player, it's not at the specific part that mentioned your company's keywords. That would mean I had to listen to a long clip/story to find what part was relevant to me.
The pricing structure is comprehensive, depending on how far you want your release to go.
Adding multi-media, such as photos, increases visibility quite a bit but PR Newswire charges extra for photos.
PR Newswire also charges an annual fee for storing your logo, which I think should be free for organizations that already have an account (and pay a membership fee).
PR Newswire is an industry leader and gives the user the ability to send out a press release, to a wide audience, very quickly and easily. The pricing is on par with other companies (perhaps they are a bit higher) but they do send useful "visibility" reports after a release is distributed, which is helpful when trying to explain ROI to C suite leaders. You also can email or fax your own distribution list, which is helpful and reduces the need for a media monitoring service
Honestly this is probably the absolute worst part of the company. I had maybe 5 different emails from 5 different people when attempting to use this service, and I never knew who my account manager was and who the other people were.
I prefer Cision PR Software over Media Monitor Pro. Cision PR Software is more expensive, but offers more options and is a better overall comprehensive solution to media monitoring and reporting as it monitors television, print and online news. Media Monitor Pro only monitors television news clips, so I have to also use another service to monitor for print and online coverage, then create my own reports from scratch using analytics and data from both platforms.
PR Newswire and Businesswire are familiar, similar products in terms of newswire distribution services. Many times it comes down to client familiarity with one service over the other, the cost per distribution, the reach of distribution, as well as other related fees, i.e., you have to be a member of PR Newswire to use the service and then pay fees on top of that for individual distributions.
Media Monitor Pro had a negative impact in terms of timely access to some news clips. Although the reports are delivered regularly, the issues with clicking on particular clips and not having them play properly were frustrating and left us without key clips needed in crisis situations.
Media Monitor Pro had a positive impact in terms of allowing us to easily store and categorize clips through folders by topic and date.
